W. H. Hutton, in the introduction to his Letters of William Stubbs, drew a comparison between his subject and Edward Gibbon as the greatest historians of their times. He went on to suggest, however, that Stubbs ‘was much more than a historian’: ‘the Church of England’, Hutton added, ‘will not cease to remember him as a faithful ruler and a servant of the servants of God’.Footnote 1 Hutton saw Stubbs, then, as amounting to ‘much more’ than Gibbon by virtue of his churchmanship. Whatever the relative stature of the two historians, this article suggests that Stubbs's religion should be taken just as seriously by historians today as it was by Hutton over a century ago.
A study of the Christian content of Stubbs's thought is badly needed if we are to understand this major historiographical figure. Contemporaries were in no doubt about Stubbs's significance: G. W. Prothero suggested that ‘perhaps no English historian that ever lived did more to advance the knowledge of English history’,Footnote 2 whilst for F. W. Maitland he was quite simply ‘king’ amongst historians.Footnote 3 Holding the regius chair of modern history at Oxford from 1866 to 1884, during which time history was established as an independent university discipline, Stubbs played a key role in the professionalisation of English historical scholarship. Subsequently, as bishop first of Chester then Oxford, he occupied two important sees at a time when the Church of England faced monumental challenges to its temporal and spiritual legitimacy – challenges to which Stubbs responded with trenchant historical argument. His three-volume magnum opus The constitutional history of England, together with his pedagogical Select charters, exercised an almost hegemonic influence over university syllabuses, not only during his lifetime but for decades afterwards. Despite all this, as the medievalist James Campbell has recently lamented, the ‘precise origins [of Stubbs's ideas] and, in particular, their relationship to the theological thought of the day have not been established’.Footnote 4
Paradoxically, this failure may be a consequence of Stubbs's towering influence. Stubbs the professional, the author of the Constitutional history and Select charters, cast a long shadow over twentieth-century historiography – a shadow not entirely escaped by historians who have since approached Stubbs as a subject for study in his own right. This has generated a lopsided model of his historical thought, treating it as just another filiation of a ‘Whig’ narrative about English history. Piet Blaas's study of the crisis of Whig history relates Stubbs to a high-political context of doubtful relevance, but makes no reference at all to his religious contexts.Footnote 5 John Burrow's otherwise lapidary discussion of Stubbs in A liberal descent is also curiously insensitive to religion, knocking the squarely High-Church bishop into the round hole of a Whig-liberal descent: Stubbs's conservative, pessimistic and polemical elements are thus, together with his churchmanship, splintered off and discarded.Footnote 6 Part of the purpose of this article is to pick up these pieces and put the bishop-historian back together, suggesting along the way that the discarded elements were more central to Stubbs's thought than the Whiggish ones so elevated by Burrow.
These religious elements have already been given some consideration in more recent treatments of Stubbs by Christopher Parker, Michael Bentley, and Anthony Brundage and Richard Cosgrove;Footnote 7 none of these, however, is able to offer a serious revision since they rest – like Blaas's and Burrow's accounts – on too narrow a source base, drawing heavily on the canonical Constitutional history with occasional reference to published correspondence and lectures. A concentration on such sources comes naturally enough to the late twentieth-century professional – often secular – historian, prone to omit consideration of works written outside academia, but it neglects two important sides to Stubbs's oeuvre: his early work as antiquary and editor; and his ecclesiastical works, including sermons, visitation charges, pamphlets and contributions to the 1883 report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts. Together with what remains extant of his unpublished correspondence, these works allow for a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of his thought.
Such a revision requires a re-examination of his institutional and intellectual contexts. Institutionally, Stubbs is too easily reduced solely to a professional context, with a focus on his tenure of the regius chair, his work as contributing editor to the Rolls Series and his rejection of literary periodicals.Footnote 8 But this professionalism cannot be understood in abstraction from the amateur and clerical contexts that characterised his career both before and after his spell at Oxford. As well as inaugurating a tradition of university historians, Stubbs was a late but prominent figure in two distinct traditions of antiquaries. The first is that of the amateur or gentleman antiquary engaged in local or genealogical studies: as country parson of Navestock in Essex (1850–66), contributing to the Gentleman's Magazine and Archaeological Journal on such subjects as the early history of English cathedrals, Stubbs fits archetypally into this mould.Footnote 9 The second, perhaps more important, tradition is that of the constitutional and ecclesiastical antiquaries of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 10 Stubbs admired these scholars as England's greatest historians to date: his reading of Hearne, Dugdale and Prynne as an undergraduate inspired him to the study of history, whilst in his inaugural lecture as regius professor, he saluted ‘the names of Bishops Nicholson, Tanner and Kennett, of Atterbury, Wake, and Gibson’ for their ‘historical exertion second to none either in the importance of its researches or in the value of their results’.Footnote 11 Burrow's description of Stubbs's history as the apotheosis of ‘Burkean’ political ideas is thus wide of the mark: Stubbs did not draw at all on Burke – their similitude should instead be attributed to their shared appreciation of ancient-constitution scholarship.Footnote 12
This ecclesiastical lineage fundamentally revises our understanding of the intellectual origins not only of Stubbs, but of the historical profession more generally. He did indeed stand with one foot on the German giants; but the other foot rested closer to home, on the shoulders of English bishops, parsons and antiquaries. The resulting picture of historical study in England is one of greater continuity across the amateur-professional divide. This continuity was in great measure religious, as ecclesiastical antiquities and controversies provided material for clergy to engage in source-based historical scholarship both before and after the establishment of academic history and the arrival of Geschichtsquellen.Footnote 13 As Maitland later testified, ‘in Victorian England a vast part of the best work that was done for medieval history was done by clerks in holy orders. It would be far too little to say that in this, as in many other quarters, the Church of England fully maintained her reputation as a learned Church’.Footnote 14
The limitation of twentieth-century, secular understandings of professionalisation is further shown by a sketch of Stubbs's career: the standard definitions of professionalisation expounded by A. J. Engel and T. W. Heyck both assume a career structure dedicated to academia and the marginalisation of clerical activities, but Stubbs does not fit this mould.Footnote 15 Most obviously, in standing down as professor to become a bishop, he had all but to abandon his historical activities, declining for instance to contribute to the newly-founded English Historical Review.Footnote 16 Nor had he stayed in the (comparatively secular) modern history chair out of choice: he had sought to transfer to the regius chair of ecclesiastical history, attached to a canonry, just two years after returning to Oxford, and as early as 1875 had been ‘coveting Deaneries’.Footnote 17 Whilst regius professor he also held a country living, a college chaplaincy and, from 1879, a St Paul's canonry.Footnote 18 It may therefore be more helpful to view Stubbs as a member of a learned estate of clergy than simply as a member of an academic community.
But the contextual key that unlocks most about Stubbs's thought was his debt to the Oxford Movement. Having only arrived in Oxford for the first time in 1845 – the year of Newman's conversion – Stubbs is too young to have been one of the original Tractarians. Yet he became a committed High Churchman at Oxford and remained so for the rest of his life. His sermons and charges unswervingly follow Tractarian orthodoxies. He believed in the real presence, celebrated facing east and, more politically, sympathised with H. P. Liddon's campaign on behalf of Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 19 He forged friendships with leading High Churchmen, including Liddon and R. W. Church, and came to revere E. B. Pusey as ‘the Master’.Footnote 20 He even assisted Pusey's efforts towards reconciliation with Rome, helping to compile an edition of a tract against the immaculate conception by a fifteenth-century cardinal which Pusey then published and distributed to leading Roman Catholics in the hope of persuading the forthcoming Vatican Council to abandon the doctrine.Footnote 21 We may therefore dismiss Burrow's suggestion that Stubbs's High Churchmanship was merely part of a ‘capacity for Romanticism [that] exhausted itself early’;Footnote 22 instead, as this article will show, it pervaded not only his friendships and religious doctrines, but also his historical scholarship from start to finish.
The English Church in English history
Since at least Herbert Butterfield's 1944 work, The Englishman and his history, there has been a keen appreciation of the way in which historians’ writings about the English past have shaped and sustained national identity.Footnote 23 The idea of a Whig interpretation of English history, popularised by Butterfield but developed most of all by Burrow, has come to be seen as the prevailing national historiography in the Victorian era, transcending the petty divisions of the ballot box; though defined fluidly, it might be said to consist typically of a self-confident narrative about the unique nature of English historical development, organised around the theme of a progressive and consensual unfolding of constitutional liberty.Footnote 24 It is also associated with Protestantism: Butterfield refers to ‘Protestant, progressive’ historians, whilst Burrow affirms that ‘a Whig historian of England must of necessity be Protestant’.Footnote 25 Such an entrenched concept cannot be uprooted in an article such as this – it is instead accepted here – but Stubbs's place in such a Whig canon has to be questioned. He was indeed concerned with the origins of English constitutional liberty – this was, of course, the central theme of his great work – and in this important respect he may be described as a Whig historian. But his history was by no means Protestant and progressive; it was, rather, Tractarian and reactionary, giving pride of place to the Church and its clergy.
Stubbs's distance from Whig historiography may be seen in his condemnation of historians associated with Protestantism, parliamentarianism and Whig partisanship. He was particularly critical of three historians with links to the Whig political hub at Holland House in the early nineteenth century – John Allen, Henry Hallam and T. B. Macaulay.Footnote 26 He anathematised the erastian Hallam for his ‘atavistic Whiggism’, repeatedly attacking both him and Macaulay for their ‘historical misrepresentations’ of the Church; indeed, he found Macaulay deeply partisan, remarking scathingly, ‘how easy must have been the victory of Macaulay's hero if all his adversaries were the pitiful knaves and fools that they appear to him to have been’.Footnote 27 The atheist Allen's Inquiry into the rise and growth of the royal prerogative received similarly short shrift as a ‘very shallow and unfair’ anti-monarchical and anti-clerical tract.Footnote 28
These antipathies cohere with the political and religious views that Stubbs expressed in the pulpit. Delivering the memorial sermon for Queen Victoria at Windsor, he laid bare his high-Tory monarchism, speaking of ‘the tragedy of the royal martyr [Charles i], itself the sealing of the crown of England to the faith of the Church’.Footnote 29 Another sermon, simply entitled Clericalism, condemned the recent surge of anti-clericalism in England and Europe, particularly lamenting its ignorance of the historical beneficence of the Church.Footnote 30 This consistency between Stubbs's historiography and preaching shows that, in both his historical and clerical capacities, he was engaged in refuting, rather than supporting, the narratives that had issued from Whig historians in the first half of the nineteenth century.
More positively, Stubbs used his histories to construct an English national identity inseparably bound up with a Tractarian religious one. He explicitly rejected the claim that the English Church and its faith were ‘Protestant’, affirming that they were instead ‘Catholic’.Footnote 31 These catholic and English identities might be supposed to have been in conflict, insofar as the one was universal whilst the other was national; but as a High Churchman, Stubbs viewed the English Church as a branch of the Catholic Church, thereby reconciling the ecclesiastical with the national, a prerequisite for telling a High-Church – as distinct from Whiggish – story of the English past.
Even Stubbs's interest in English history was built on a broader dismissal of ancient history in favour of modern history, distinguishing the two periods in religious terms: modern history, unlike ancient history, was alive to the present because of the ‘living unity’ furnished by Christianity.Footnote 32 This was particularly the case with modern liberty, which Stubbs viewed as a Christian and Germanic inheritance rather than a classical one: ‘the freedom of modern Europe’, he wrote, ‘is based not on the freedom of Greece or Rome, but on the ancient freedom of the Teutonic nations, civilised, organised, and reduced to system by agencies of which Christianity and the system of the church are far the greatest and most important’.Footnote 33 Even the Renaissance owed a debt to the Church since it was only in the monasteries that ‘Latin civilisation’ had been preserved.Footnote 34 More specifically, the liberty of Athens, the Italian republics and the German confederations had proved to be dead ends; only in England did freedom continue to flourish.Footnote 35
Stubbs's main narrative histories – the Constitutional history and The early Plantagenets – were both attempts to understand how this freedom came into being. As in no other country, he argued, the Church in England was ‘the guardian of liberties’, and at the crisis-points of the national story, it comes forward ‘to win new liberties and revive the old’.Footnote 36 When freedom was threatened in the twelfth century, the Church ‘unite[d] Norman and Englishman in the resistance to tyrants’, and at Magna Carta, the central moment of the Constitutional history, a crucial detail in the narrative is that it was the bishops more than the barons who secured the liberties of the commons.Footnote 37 In spinning together the story of constitutional liberty with that of the clergy, Stubbs subtly entwined the central strand of Whig historiography – that of freedom – with a deeply Tractarian clericalism.
But if the political elements of Stubbs's work combined Whig and Tractarian themes in equal measure, the social and ecclesiastical elements are more purely High-Church. A common theme of Tractarian social criticism, as Simon Skinner has shown, was the contrast between the Church's historical guardianship of the poor and the present-day callousness of orthodox political economy and the poor laws.Footnote 38 This theme is reprised in Stubbs's forays into social history. The closing chapter of his Constitutional history is the most notable of these, arguing that poverty was a rare phenomenon in medieval England thanks to the Church's eleemosynary and educational roles. Veiled criticism of the modern poor laws may be found in his emphasis on the medieval Church ‘providing for the settled poor without putting them to unnecessary shame’, whilst autobiographical undertones are heard when Stubbs, a poor undergraduate servitor who had risen to a regius chair, speaks of the medieval Church as a ladder of social mobility.Footnote 39
This contrasts with his close friend, the medieval historian J. R. Green, who described the late medieval Church as ‘rendered powerless by a want of spiritual life, by a moral inertness … and its blind hostility to the intellectual movement which was beginning to stir the world’.Footnote 40 Green, a disillusioned clergyman,Footnote 41 seems to project his feelings about the Victorian Church on to the medieval one; and whilst Stubbs was not uncritical of the fifteenth-century Church, it is hard to imagine him condemning it as harshly as Green. Whereas for Green, social and ecclesiastical problems seemed almost immemorial, for Stubbs they were contingent on the evil of the present.
Most fundamentally, though, the Church was integral to English history because of its role in founding and maintaining the nation itself. This contribution of the Church was an exceptional feature of English history:
The Church of England is not only the agency by which Christianity is brought to a heathen people … The church is this in many other countries besides Britain; but here it is much more. The unity of the church in England was the pattern of the unity of the state.Footnote 42
The crucial detail here, one that Stubbs laboured at every opportunity, is that the national Church anticipated, even forged, the nation-state. As he remarked elsewhere, ‘under the Heptarchic arrangement there was no organised unity but the ecclesiastical … it was through the Church that the nation first learnt to recognise her unity’.Footnote 43 The rest of the Anglo-Saxon period is depicted as the Church's heroic age, a celebratory warmth suffusing Stubbs's prose: ‘the organisms of Church and State advance side by side … The archdeacon or bishop presides with the ealdorman or sheriff in the shiremoot; the parish priest leads his people to the hundredmoot’.Footnote 44 Even compared to the continental Churches, Stubbs saw this period as exhibiting ‘the most complete possible union of church and state’, in which both partners were beneficiaries.Footnote 45 He thus credited to the Church both the golden age of England's past and the creation of its national consciousness.
After the Conquest, the Church, for Stubbs, fell into gradual decline as it became more and more dependent on the papacy, and hence alienated from national life. The first disturbance of Church-State harmony came from the rival threats of Norman erastianism and the attempted theocracy of the Hildebrandine reforms – in which there is more than an echo of Victorian erastianism and papal aggression.Footnote 46 Despite these threats, ‘the crown, the clergy, and the commons, were banded against the baronage’ from the Conquest to Magna Carta; but, subsequently, the Church was ‘greatly perturbed by the attraction and repulsion of the papacy’, leaving the king to fight it out against a united baronage and commons.Footnote 47 This trajectory was paralleled by that of the monasteries, which had a ‘thoroughly national spirit’ under Dunstan, but sided with Rome after the Conquest so that by 1500 the ‘registers of the abbeys are no longer records of national history, but of petty law-suits’.Footnote 48 The Church's popularity and national spirit thus waned, in Stubbs's account, as it gravitated closer to Rome.
Understanding this papal-driven decline of the Church and monasteries across the medieval period is vital for appreciating Stubbs's equipoise in giving a High-Church account of the Reformation, which differed significantly from both Protestant and Roman Catholic renderings of the subject. Had Stubbs not emphasised late-medieval decline, his histories would be indistinguishable from those of Roman Catholics such as Bishop Milner and Augustus Pugin, who exalted the fifteenth-century Church in order to condemn the reformers.Footnote 49 At the same time, his celebration of the early medieval Church marked him out from many Protestants, who stressed its depravity so as to vindicate the Reformation; Stubbs himself noted this phenomenon in his typically blunt epistolary style, remarking ‘I do not believe a Dissenter could write a history of England … the determination of the Dissenters to see nothing good before the Reformation is so obvious in all that they do, that I have begun to wonder that they allow that our Saviour lived before it.’Footnote 50
Consequently, the approaches of neither Protestants nor Roman Catholics were acceptable to Stubbs, since both implied, for different reasons, the discontinuity of the Church across the Reformation. Whilst this was unproblematic for most Protestants, who did not rely doctrinally on the historic continuity of the Church, it was deeply problematic for High Churchmen because it implied that the English Church was no longer a branch of the Catholic Church, but had been lopped off by the excesses of the Reformation.Footnote 51 This need to minimise discontinuities explains Stubbs's view of the medieval Church: steering between the Scylla of Protestant condemnation and the Charybdis of Roman Catholic veneration, he acknowledged the Church's faults but blamed them on the ‘adventitious’ influence of Rome, hence encouraging the reader to infer that the removal of papal interference was wholly justified, but that later Protestant excesses were not.Footnote 52 He was thus able to chart a thoroughly Tractarian course through the perilous seas of Reformation controversy.
Following from this, Stubbs drew a sharp distinction between the Henrician Reformation and the Protestant Reformation. In two lectures on Henry viii, which he described as a continuation of the Constitutional history,Footnote 53 Stubbs contended that the English Church and nation supported the vernacular Bible, clerical marriage, the dissolution of the monasteries and the lifting of ‘the yoke of Rome’, thus implying that the major changes of the Henrician Reformation were merely implementations of long-held English aspirations.Footnote 54 He elsewhere described Henry ii's Constitutions of Clarendon as an embryo form of Henry viii's settlement, again suggesting a continuous anti-papal policy.Footnote 55 In these crucial respects, Stubbs suggested, the Henrician Reformation drew on long trends in English history, restoring the Church to the ancient freedom and closeness to the nation that it enjoyed in the Anglo-Saxon era.
Stubbs sedulously refrained from writing much about the post-Henrician era, owing to the lasting bitterness of its religious and political disputes. The vehemence of his occasional obiter dicta on the subject indicate that he did so advisedly: the most syntactically heated passage of the Constitutional history is a digression on historians who
sympathise with puritanism as an effort after freedom, and put out of sight the fact that puritanism was itself a grinding social tyranny, that wrought out its ends by unscrupulous detraction and by the profane handling of things which should have been sacred even to the fanatic if he really believed in the cause for which he raged.Footnote 56
The targets of his ire are unspecified, but would surely have included the Congregationalist historian Robert Vaughan, professor of history at University College, London, whose histories of the seventeenth century drew close links between Puritanism and religious liberty; he may equally have had Hallam and Macaulay in mind, however, who, like Vaughan, sympathised with the Puritans – albeit in a more limited, ambivalent manner.Footnote 57 And in another barb aimed at those sympathetic to the Roundhead cause, he made an unfavourable and provocative comparison between the papal ‘yoke’ and ‘the still bitterer thraldom of Puritanism’.Footnote 58 Like Tractarians who opposed the creation of a joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric in Jerusalem, he made plain his hostility to continental reformers: in Stubbs's description of the German Reformation, Luther's Saxony ‘greedily hurries into the Reformation, and most ruthlessly carries out the extermination of the older system which it had supported so long’, creating a breach in continuity that today remained ‘painful to an historically inclined mind’.Footnote 59 It is perhaps unsurprising that one of Stubbs's triumphs in Oxford politics was to defeat plans to commemorate Luther's birth,Footnote 60 and that he laid the blame for the French revolution – a ‘defiance of God’ – squarely at the door of the German Reformation.Footnote 61
This subversion of the Whig equation between Protestantism and liberty aligns Stubbs rather with romantic Tories, Tractarians, Roman Catholics and even radicals of the Cobbett variety, than with Hallam and Macaulay.Footnote 62 Indeed, Stubbs's closest affinity – apart from with fellow Tractarians – is perhaps with Young England, with whom he shared a paternalist, monarchical Toryism as well as a romantic idealisation of English medieval society and religion.Footnote 63 There are particularly striking parallels with the historical narratives embedded in Disraeli's Young England novels, in which pre-Reformation social harmony is seen to give way to the ‘Puritanic yoke’ and Whig oligarchy – a very similar trajectory to that adumbrated by Stubbs.Footnote 64 Therefore Stubbs did not, pace Burrow, hold the ‘Whig line’ against ‘Tory Radical’ and Catholic medieval nostalgia: quite the contrary.Footnote 65 It is true that he tended to avoid controversy: writing from a university chair in the 1870s, he naturally abstained from the polemic that characterised the 1830s and 1840s writers whom he otherwise resembles; the existence of Victorian political consensus on the importance of constitutional liberty further allowed him to appeal as much to the liberal agnostic Maitland as to the High-Church Hutton. None of this, however, should obscure the originality and boldness of Stubbs's project: to retell English history from a clerical, Tractarian perspective, whilst simultaneously adhering to the central story of the unfolding of constitutional liberty.
‘From the Study of History the Church has everything to gain’
This bold claim for historical study was made by Stubbs in 1867 on his return to Oxford,Footnote 66 and applies to a far broader field than the narratives about the English past examined above, helping to explain his approach to writing history as a churchman and his view of the role of history in public debate. In these areas, Stubbs openly acknowledged that his religious predilections influenced his historical writing, but saw no contradiction between this and the writing of true history.
This is seen most clearly where he writes as an ecclesiastical historian, notably in his edition of the Lutheran Johann Lorenz von Mosheim's Institutes of ecclesiastical history, to which he appended a continuation of church history from 1800 to 1860. In his preface to this edition he expressed his surprise that Mosheim chose to write ‘a history of that faith on the maintenance of which we believe the salvation of our souls to depend … without any show of spiritual feeling’. This defect was offset, in Stubbs's view, by the learning and fairness of Mosheim's writings, but there is a sense that Stubbs only published the work faute de mieux: other church historians are dismissed as ‘too rationalistic’ or too ‘corrupted’ by recent German theology ‘to be safely trusted in the hands of the young’. Regarding his own continuation, Stubbs did not claim to write impartially, arguing instead that
it is almost impossible to write without some bias; and it seems to me more honest to let that bias be seen than to attempt to write as if one had none, or was unconscious of it. An English Churchman cannot, and ought not to try to, write a Church History in the tone of a heathen.Footnote 67
There are similarities here with J. H. Newman's castigation of the ecclesiastical historian H. H. Milman for his ‘external contemplation of Christianity’,Footnote 68 indicating that, whilst High Churchmen such as Newman and Stubbs might respect the erudition of liberal Protestant historians, they could not endorse the attempt to free oneself from Christian presuppositions. No such attempt was made by Stubbs himself in his continuation of Mosheim, which praised Tractarians and Eastern Orthodox Christians whilst robustly criticising German philosophy, arguing that Kant's putting ‘human reason on an equality with divine revelation’ was the first step on a path that led downwards via Hegel to terminate with Marx's belief that ‘“the true aim is none other than entire liberation from all religion”’ .Footnote 69 All this confirms that Stubbs was very far from being, as Reba Soffer suggests, ‘a true believer who concealed his biases, even from himself, behind the façade of a dispassionate historian’: instead, he openly declared his partiality and wrote his history accordingly.Footnote 70
There is no suggestion, though, that in doing so Stubbs saw himself as abandoning historical truth. Instead, he averred that – by virtue of his ‘clerical spirit and mind’ – he was well-disposed to write truthful history, because it made him ‘convinced that truth and justice must in the end confirm the doctrine that it [sic] upholds’.Footnote 71 This did not imply that the historian need reach an objective or value-free position in order to approach historical truth; instead, truth was, as he suggested in a sermon, ‘a light whose prismatic colours have to be realised by countless eyes at countless angles’, but which nevertheless had a ‘unity’.Footnote 72 Stubbs's confidence in the truth of his religion was such that he saw the transcending of Christianity by the historian as self-defeating, not rewarding.
This same confidence underpinned Stubbs's contributions to public debate over the Church's established status, liturgy and ecclesiastical validity. The first of these, the problems generated by establishment, preoccupied Stubbs heavily as both clergyman and historian. Though strongly opposed to disestablishment, he was equally hostile to what he saw as erastian interference in church affairs. It seems to have been these opinions that led Gladstone, another Oxonian High Churchman, to appoint him first to the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts (1881–3) and then to the see of Chester (1884) – a mark of special favour from Gladstone given its proximity to Hawarden.Footnote 73 The two maintained an intermittent correspondence, Gladstone at one point expressing his pleasure at having his own Remarks on the royal supremacy (1850), an attack on erastianism, ‘commended by the first historical authority of the day’ [i.e. Stubbs] in a hearing of the royal commission.Footnote 74
It is Stubbs's assiduous work on this commission that provides some of the best insights into his views on Church-State relations, which he expressed primarily through the medium of history. The royal commission's purpose was to report on the structure of the English ecclesiastical courts in general, but its focus fell inevitably on the question of the courts' subordination to the appellate jurisdiction of the (secular) privy council. From the controversial Gorham judgement of 1850 onwards, the exercise of this jurisdiction had tormented High Churchmen, since it suggested that their Church was a branch not of the universal Church but of the English state; whilst some, such as Henry Manning and Robert Wilberforce, reacted by converting to Rome, others, led by Pusey, condemned the appellate jurisdiction but nevertheless upheld the Church's connection to the State.Footnote 75 Stubbs made his views on the subject clear, describing the appellate jurisdiction as ‘a foul thing’ in private and ‘a defiance of history’ in public, whilst retreating not an inch from establishmentarianism.Footnote 76 On the commission, his approach was to argue that the question should not just be treated in legal terms, but also as a matter for ‘close historical criticism’; reform should be based on the ‘careful following up of the lines of the ecclesiastical constitution, and not on speculative utilitarian principles or on the analogies of political economy’.Footnote 77 The use of historical argument is thus set against two secular modes of argument which Stubbs held in distaste.
Although he was far from satisfied with the recommendations of the final report, Stubbs signed it without reservation and vented his views in five historical appendices, in which he claimed to show the essential independence of the Church from state interference throughout English history, with the 1833 creation of the privy council's spiritual jurisdiction (by a Whig ministry) as an ill-considered anomaly.Footnote 78 He had used similar arguments against the equally erastian 1874 Public Worship Act, which he denounced as a ‘national humiliation’ in its extreme historical ignorance.Footnote 79 Stubbs's use of historical argument reads in many ways like the approach of Wake and Atterbury to the early eighteenth-century convocation controversy, transposed into the bureaucratic Victorian idiom of a royal commission; the insistence with which Stubbs makes his claim for the historical mode of arguing suggests that it may have been losing its persuasiveness by the 1880s, but an appreciation of the importance he placed on its role in public debate is none the less central to understanding his view of the value and purpose of history.
Despite his resistance to erastianism, Stubbs remained firmly establishmentarian. His indirect defence of the established Church in the Constitutional history has already been examined, but he also presented a more programmatic historical case against disestablishment and disendowment in a pamphlet on Church and State principles, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and in his visitation charges of 1890 and 1893, which condemned moves then current for Welsh church disestablishment, a cause greatly emboldened by the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869. The fulcrum of Stubbs's historical case rested on his point that the Church was anterior to the nation state; from this he inferred that tithes and endowments were not ‘derived from’ and hence might not be ‘resumed’ by the state, though he stressed in orthodox Tractarian fashion that disestablishment was still preferable to any state interference deleterious to the Church's essential character.Footnote 80
Underlying these important technical points is a more profound argument against discontinuity as socially destructive. Disestablishment meant ‘a break in the continuity of national life so far as all the sacred influences go, and a renunciation of historic unity’, as had happened ‘in the History of France since the Revolution of 1789’, risking ‘a fall back into absolute barbarism’; it involved ‘disidentifying ourselves with our forefathers’ and erasing ‘the memory of [the nation's] growth’.Footnote 81 Continuity and memory are thus seen as the lynchpins of civilisation, identity and, above all, religion.
The root of Stubbs's fear of discontinuity, though, lay in his doctrinal emphasis on the apostolic succession. Whilst Low-Church Anglicans saw episcopacy as doctrinally inessential, Stubbs maintained that ‘the historic episcopate is of the very essence of the Church of England’, with the implication that the Church itself was called into question if its apostolic continuity was disproved.Footnote 82 It is in this context that Stubbs's greatest feat of archival scholarship, his Registrum sacrum Anglicanum, should be understood.Footnote 83 Taking at least six years to compile, this tabulation of the consecration – and hence apostolicity – of every English bishop since Augustine from the original sources in each diocese was an extraordinary effort of scholarship, and is key to understanding Stubbs's motives as a historian.
His reasons for compiling the Registrum are only partly explained in its two published editions, but are set out much more fully in the preface to the original manuscript copy of the work. Here he distinguished between the doctrine and the fact of the apostolic succession, suggesting that, whilst proving the doctrine belonged to ‘Theology’, ‘the proof of the Fact belongs to History’.Footnote 84 The validity of the English Church thus depended in part on the results of his historical research. The preface concluded that the work is ‘an enumeration [of the apostolic succession] which probably no other Church can rival’, a forceful counterclaim to the papal challenges to Anglican apostolicity that tempted some Tractarians across the Tiber.Footnote 85 In presenting so clearly the fact of apostolic succession, Stubbs hoped to persuade English priests of the importance of their apostolic commission: he acknowledged that ‘those who refuse the doctrine … will sneer’ at the work, but expressed the hope that they might reconsider their opinions in the light of his research.Footnote 86 These arguments are essentially the same as those given for the importance of the apostolic succession in the Tracts for the Times.Footnote 87 Stubbs's own personal attachment to the doctrine is shown by a sort of apostolic genealogy written in the back of the manuscript, in which Stubbs traced the commission back from Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford who would have ordained Stubbs, to the seventh-century Theodore of Canterbury, and hence implicitly to the primitive Church and Christ.Footnote 88
Stubbs returned to the subject of apostolicity in various rebuttals of papal assaults on Anglican orders, including an eirenic pamphlet intended to demonstrate to Russian Orthodox Christians the validity of the Church of England.Footnote 89 Gladstone too consulted him on the question before publishing an account of the continuity of the Elizabethan Church.Footnote 90 All this work was crucial to Stubbs's construction of an ecclesiastical identity: as standards of archival scholarship rose across Europe, his scholarship was able to provide the apparent proof of apostolicity which secured a pillar of Tractarian thought against liberal scorn and papal challenges.
As well as formulating a historical case for the Church of England, Stubbs developed an idea of how that case might be propagated in the wider world. Significantly, he shunned media that he associated with polemical or unreflective thought, inveighing against erroneous or hostile comment on religious and historical controversies by ‘casual critics’ in periodicals, newspapers and ‘trashy books’.Footnote 91 He was also acutely sensitive to the popular influence of history textbooks, writing for instance to Macmillan, the publishers, in 1894 to demand a revision of the account presented in their History Readers series of the medieval Church's relation to Rome.Footnote 92
Rather than rely on the press, Stubbs preferred the oral dissemination of church history by Anglican clergymen in parish schools, pulpits and lectures. The Church Defence Institution circulated as a pamphlet his Hints for teachers of church history – originally written as instructions to his rural deans when bishop of Chester – which emphasised the importance of teaching the historic continuity of the Church in order to combat Nonconformity in the parish and disestablishment in the country.Footnote 93 In one of his visitation charges, a paragraph beginning ‘Church doctrine must be taught in the pulpit’ discussed nothing but the teaching of church history; sermons, he stated, must contain ‘information on the history of the Church of England, her relations to the Universal Church, the great things that she has done and suffered, the continuity of her life, and the debt that England owes to her’.Footnote 94 But although the teaching of church history ‘must begin in Church’, Stubbs emphasised that it should be continued in ‘school teaching and lectures’.Footnote 95 Teaching church history in Anglican elementary schools formed a crucial element of his scheme for ‘Church Defence’, since a proper appreciation of the nation's debt to the Church might inoculate the coming generation against the disestablishmentarian bacillus.Footnote 96 He worried too about the secularity of university extension lectures in Oxford, expressing the hope that ‘the town clergy … are doing something to redress the balance’.Footnote 97 Amongst the faithful, the study of church history could refine the tone of ‘religious controversy’ within the Church, winnowing out the ‘dangerous ignorance’ on such questions as ornaments, tithes and ecclesiastical judicature.Footnote 98 Even at the parish level this was important. Since ‘Church-men and Church-women’ were called on to participate in these controversies in ‘vestry meetings or polling booths’, an educated understanding of church history was vital.Footnote 99 Stubbs's vision of the clergy's didactic role in the parish drew on an Anglican tradition more usually associated with Broad-Church thinkers such as S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice: that of the ‘clerisy’ – the clergy as a learned estate charged with the nation's education.Footnote 100 In Stubbs's vision, this clerisy was to counter the dangerously low standards of the popular press by using its privileged national position to disseminate the historical truths on which the Church depended.
As professor, Stubbs similarly cast modern history as a discipline which would nourish Christianity and the Church. His inaugural lecture and first university sermon, both delivered in 1867, shared a sense of the threat to religion, or at least to the High Church, from new and spurious forms of knowledge propagated by the ‘liberal reaction’ in the university.Footnote 101 Addressing himself, it seems, to the still-powerful conservative or High-Church dons, Stubbs offered history as an antidote: ‘the study of Modern History is, next to Theology itself, and only next in so far as Theology rests on a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious training that the mind can receive’; as modern history was coextensive with the Christian past, it became the study of all Christianity beyond revelation, and was cognate with ecclesiastical history.Footnote 102 In the context of a rapidly shifting curriculum, this may in part have been a bid to promote the study of modern history over its equally ill-established rivals in the natural sciences; but when taken with Stubbs's rejection of ancient history, it becomes clear that it was also a challenge to the traditional hegemony of Literae Humaniores, which was coming under increasing suspicion in conservative quarters for its teaching of the pre- and post-Christian philosophy of Plato and Mill – to the exclusion of the Christian knowledge that Stubbs identified with theology and modern history.Footnote 103
Stubbs reinforced these arguments in his discussion of the purposes of historical study. Though noting the utilitarian and civic merits of history, he saw these as subordinate to the study of history ‘for its own and for the truth's sake’.Footnote 104 Peter Slee interprets this as an attempt to establish history as a discipline by asserting its scientific merit.Footnote 105 But whilst this is perhaps an element of Stubbs's message, it misses the religious connotations associated with his conception of the truth – and forgets that the audience he was appealing to was more clerical than scientific. Drawing an analogy between history and natural science, Stubbs argued that both consisted of the pursuit of truth about God's creation: it was ‘in this respect’ that history was ‘to be loved and cultivated for its own sake’; it ‘[led] up to the true and highest Knowledge’ – the knowledge of God.Footnote 106 So whilst Stubbs did seek to establish history as a discipline, his approach was not to affirm its scientific ends, but instead to show its scientific character as a means of demonstrating its religious value. Even compared with other Oxford historians, Stubbs's emphasis on the Christian purpose of his subject was unusual: J. R. Green said of the lecture that he himself had lost ‘this [religious] clue to history’ as a young man;Footnote 107 and the inaugural of Stubbs's professorial successor and friend, E. A. Freeman, whilst commending history for its own sake, saw its civic function as superior, thus reversing Stubbs's priorities and stripping out the religious element.Footnote 108 Stubbs's ideas, however, seem to have been popular in the university at large, as indicated by his clear lead over the liberal Benjamin Jowett in the 1872 election to the Hebdomadal Council.Footnote 109 Gladstone, too, commended him on establishing a ‘truly historical school in England’:
I believe that it is the truly historical treatment of Christianity … which, in conjunction with a rational philosophical method such as that of Butler, will supply under God effectual bulwarks against the rash and violent unbelief, under the honourable titles of physical and of metaphysical science, rushing in upon us.Footnote 110
It was this sense of an intellectual threat to religion, described by Pusey in a letter to Stubbs as ‘the autocracy of Mill and the antitheistic philosophy’,Footnote 111 that provided the real impulse for Stubbs's Christian justification of the study of history.
But whereas Gladstone was disturbed by the natural sciences – particularly Darwinian evolution – Stubbs remained sanguine that they, like history, represented ‘a gradual approximation to a consciousness that we are growing into a perception of the workings of the Almighty Ruler’.Footnote 112 Doris Goldstein suggests that Stubbs remained largely unaffected by Darwin,Footnote 113 a conclusion confirmed by his religious works, not cited in her study, in which he pronounced that ‘the whole cosmogony of evolution can offer only to trace and disentangle the links of a chain, the origination and maintenance of which depend on causes that are as much beyond it as they are beyond the reach of any other effort of human thought’.Footnote 114 The crucial word here is ‘maintenance’: Stubbs assimilated evolution with his belief in the continued providential guidance of history, and so did not reject it as threatening.
So, despite Darwin, Stubbs remained unconcerned by the discoveries of human and natural history for most of his life. Two episodes in his later years, though, saw him visibly disturbed by applications of the historical method. The first of these was Maitland's refutation of Stubbs's argument, set out in the royal commission's historical appendix, that Roman canon law was not legally binding on medieval English ecclesiastical courts.Footnote 115 This may sound like a minor point, but Stubbs realised that some might argue that Maitland's conclusions impinged not only on present ecclesiastical jurisprudence, but ‘even on the essential identity of a National Church’.Footnote 116 In the final edition of his Seventeen lectures, Stubbs inserted a disclaimer that partly accepted Maitland's criticisms; yet although his discomfort was evident, he did not confront the problem that, for once, historical scholarship had convincingly challenged his view of the essential and continuous independence of the national Church.Footnote 117
Still more seriously, Stubbs's old age was troubled by the problem of biblical criticism. By the 1890s, of course, the application of historical methods to the Bible was nothing new: Stubbs himself in his continuation of Mosheim had attacked the biblical criticism of Strauss and Jowett, and elsewhere recounted how he had surreptitiously disposed of a copy of Renan's Life of Jesus that his friend J. R. Green had been planning to read.Footnote 118 But this dismissive attitude suddenly evaporated in a visitation charge of 1890, in which Stubbs acknowledged the power of ‘analytical criticism’, suggesting that the best policy was to wait for ‘more light’.Footnote 119
This shift appears to have been triggered by the 1889 publication of Lux mundi, a collection of essays on the incarnation edited by Charles Gore, liberal Anglo-Catholic and principal of Pusey House.Footnote 120 Gore's own contribution triggered controversy amongst Anglo-Catholics as it advanced a kenotic theory of the incarnation, emphasising Christ's humanity by means of biblical criticism to such an extent that some feared that he undermined Christ's divinity.Footnote 121 Stubbs was unable to dismiss this out of hand, as he had with earlier criticism, not only because Gore, like him, was an Anglo-Catholic, but also because he was Gore's diocesan and president of the governors of Pusey House.Footnote 122 His 1890 charge, sounding its uncertain note, did not lead Gore to back down; quite the reverse. When Gore finally left Pusey House in 1893, Stubbs felt moved to write to him, saying ‘I do not think you are at all aware of the terrible effect the teaching [i.e. biblical criticism] is having … among faithful people’, and urging him to read his forthcoming charge.Footnote 123 In this charge, Stubbs recognised that the policy of waiting for more light had not worked; and although he continued to argue that critics acted thoughtlessly, he now also engaged directly with their contentions, rejecting their methodology and in particular the kenotic theory. In doing so, he treated biblical criticism as another form of history in order to deploy his authority as a historian to question it.Footnote 124 Having been written as a charge, its intention was presumably to quiet the doubts of clergy in his diocese; his tone, however, was troubled rather than confident, and he concluded not by offering a solution but by stressing the difficulties of faith. None of this is to suggest that Stubbs himself felt his faith challenged by Gore's work; but his previous conviction – that the dissemination of historical knowledge inevitably reinforced orthodox Anglican belief – seems to have been seriously disturbed.
For the greater part of his life, however, Stubbs was able to sustain his confidence in the ability of history to support the Church. This is the reverse of the process described by traditional narratives of intellectual secularisation: the fictional Robert Elsmere's loss of faith, for example, is caused by his historical researches into early medieval France, which prompt him to consider how historical criticism might affect the Bible; and a similar process is charted in Owen Chadwick's The secularization of the European mind, which emphasises the role of historical scholarship, including Renan's Life of Jesus, in undermining certain forms of faith.Footnote 125 But the archival research of the Registrum sacrum Anglicanum, the narrative of the Constitutional history, and the political intent of the royal commission appendices, all show how Stubbs harnessed different forms of Victorian historical scholarship to his aims and beliefs as a churchman, indicating that history and secularisation were not in this case conjoined – a conclusion which supports Michael Bentley's broader verdict that history tended not to contribute to intellectual secularisation in England.Footnote 126 In Stubbs's own hands, the historical method largely fulfilled his prediction that the Church had nothing to fear from it; when applied to the Bible, however, even in the reverential hands of Anglo-Catholics such as Gore, or to English history, less reverentially, in Maitland's, Stubbs saw that professional historical scholarship could have destabilising consequences for the Church and its adherents.
Providence, progress and time
Stubbs's first sermon from the university pulpit in Oxford was preached on the text of Ephesians v. 16, ‘The days are evil’. It is a sermon profoundly ill-at-ease with the present: ‘the days are dark, evil, too thickly dark and evil for our knowledge of the history of the past to supply a parallel’.Footnote 127 History thus confirms the decadence rather than the superiority of the present. A similar message forms the conclusion of one of his charges: ‘I, for one, can read in the history of our country no indefeasible privilege of perpetual progress, no immunity from decay.’Footnote 128 Where progress is recognised, it is not always celebrated; in a lecture he lamented ‘the increasing rate of the world's progress, its unmeaning competitions and the exasperation of its party conflicts’.Footnote 129 These are not, pace John Burrow, the words of someone with ‘a sense, sober, admittedly, compared with Macaulay's, of the reality and possibilities of progress’, or with ‘confidence’ about understanding both past and present;Footnote 130 they are instead those of a clergyman who described himself as ‘reactionary and obstinate’,Footnote 131 often as hostile to progress as Whigs such as Macaulay were sympathetic.
What progress Stubbs did celebrate was providential, not man-made. In a crucial passage towards the end of the Constitutional history, he explained: ‘The good is to come out of the evil … the good does not spring from it, but is drawn up through it. In the history of nations, as of men, every good and perfect gift is from above.’Footnote 132 Only with this thought in mind can one of the most apparently ‘Whiggish’ statements in his magnum opus be understood. His reference to ‘[the nation's] career which has never, since the Revolution of 1688, been materially impeded’, when quoted out of context, sounds Macaulayesque. It is prefaced, however, by the remark: ‘But most strange of all, out of the weakness and foulness and darkness of the [seventeenth century], the nation, church, peers and people, emerge with a strong hold on better things.’Footnote 133 Progress is thus strange and mysterious, rather than simple and inevitable: after all, what could be stranger than evil giving rise to good? Man is fallen, not perfectible, but God's providence can draw good out of him. The same thought recurs more explicitly in Stubbs's lecture on Henry viii: ‘under the Divine power which brings good out of evil and overrules the wrath of man to the praise of God, we have received good as well as evil through the means of this “majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome”’.Footnote 134
Stubbs was never precise about the relationship between divine and human agency in history. One of the clearest statements that he made was in a lecture in which he averred that ‘the Divine Providence acts in the government of the world through secondary agencies, and the chief agency in the department of history which we are attempting is the will of men … than which no agencies can be conceived more capricious, more uncertain, more incalculable’. Humans are clearly presumed to have free will, but providence is able to act through them. This combination of an incalculable free will with an inscrutable providence means that there can be no ‘science of history’ that ‘exalts the generalisations of partially informed men into laws’, as the historian cannot ‘bind as by a law the action of Divine Providence’.Footnote 135 Elsewhere he was more pithy: ‘I do not believe in the philosophy of history, and so do not believe in Buckle.’Footnote 136
This denial of the laws of philosophic history leaves Stubbs's writings ‘a record of changes and chances, progress and retrogression, activity and rest’.Footnote 137 Even Magna Carta is described as contingent rather than inevitable.Footnote 138 The ‘erring and straying men’ of the last line of the Constitutional history are in fact the protagonists of the whole work, which turns out to be a comedy of errors as sin and ignorance are brought to happy conclusions under providence. Hence the peroration to the Constitutional history depicts the relationship between unconscious human agency and a superintending benevolence by affirming ‘the great lesson of history’ to be that, although the best men in history so often fought against one another,
the real and true leaders had far more in common than they knew of; they struggled, in the dark or in the twilight, against the evil which was there, and which they hated with equal sincerity … Their blows fell at random: men perished in arms against one another whose hearts were set on the same end and aim.Footnote 139
There are hints here of Matthew Arnold's ‘darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night’, itself an allusion to Thucydides's description of the battle of Epipolae,Footnote 140 and it seems likely that Stubbs too was echoing Thucydides, and doing so with surprisingly similar intent. Both Stubbs and Arnold are describing the darkness and chaos of the human condition in the absence of God. For Stubbs, though, the ignorant armies are merely in a state of probation; good will be drawn out of their struggle by a providential force beyond their comprehension.
The other implication of this image is that even apparently meaningless evil or decay can be understood with reference to providence, thus giving meaning to the historian's attempt to chronicle it. The swirling vicissitudes and darkness of some periods appear ‘paradoxical’ to the historian, ‘until they are viewed in connexion with the general course of human history, in which the ebb and flow of the life of nations is seen to depend on … the guidance of a Higher Hand’.Footnote 141 Even if the devil is found in the detail, God's providence can be traced in the overarching scheme. This faith gives hope to the historian: ‘the chronicler [of the fifteenth-century constitution] might lay down his pen with a heavy heart’ did he not know that the darkness – as in the image of the night battle – was temporary, ‘“as the morning spread upon the mountains,” darkest before the dawn’.Footnote 142 Christianity thus underpinned the historical enterprise in a quite fundamental way: without it, the meaning of the past and its vicissitudes is again plunged into darkness, and the historian's activity becomes pointless.
Behind these accounts of progress and providence, though, there is a set of assumptions about time. These he expressed more fully in his sermons than his histories. In the pulpit of his home church of Knaresborough, for instance, he suggested that it is by the ‘unchangeableness [of God's works] that we judge the mutability of all things besides’.Footnote 143 To be secular is thus to be changeable, whereas to be divine is to be changeless. In a sense, these are unexceptional assumptions; but when applied to Stubbs's horror of discontinuity, it becomes apparent that this is in fact a horror of man's earthly condition and distance from God. This is again evident in his conception of the Church in time, which he located at the intersection between secular mutability and divine eternality. The incarnation is the moment when these two forms of time meet, and since ‘the Church of Christ is … the extension of the Incarnation’ through history, Christianity is ‘an historical religion’ in which the Church, ‘by historical continuity, not merely by philosophic agreement’, allows the present to ‘connect’ with ‘the great truth of the Incarnation of God, the Atonement, and the Corporate Life of His Mystical Body’.Footnote 144 Strikingly, Stubbs suggested that
The Church of England is, to you and to me, the point and matter of contact, at and by which the great community of the Holy Catholic Church becomes a real, tangible, material fact to our experience … England is not one whit less near to the Mount Sion, the Church of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, than were Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus; the nineteenth century lies before Him … on one level plane with the first century or the tenth.Footnote 145
In connecting the present to the eternal via the incarnation, the Church is thus abstracted from secular time: its essential continuity, found in the continuity of doctrine and the apostolic succession, allows it to mediate between sublunary change and heavenly permanence. Peter Hinchliff has described the ‘problem of historicity’ faced by the late Victorian Church as that of a historical religion which had to reconcile the ‘particularity’ of history to the ‘universal’ of God, suggesting that continuity was often the solution.Footnote 146 This certainly seems to have been the case for Stubbs, who used continuity to allow the Church to evade change. It is less afflicted by time than the purely secular, but less immune from time than the purely divine.
This qualified exposure to earthly change was demonstrated most clearly at moments such as the Reformation, which show ‘the terrible risks … of losing all sense or desire of continuity, identity, or communion with the historic Catholic Christendom’,Footnote 147 the moral of which was that change in the present Church should be resisted. But however much the Church is corrupted by secular change, Stubbs took comfort in eschatology, as is evident from the Knaresborough sermon and from the closing sentence of his continuation of Mosheim, where he prayed that God may ‘speedily cleanse and purify her [the Church] wholly and us in her, and present to Himself a glorious church’.Footnote 148 In writing of the night battles of earthly change, he found hope in the providential superintendence of secular history, in the continuity of ecclesiastical history, and in eschatology through the timelessness of God.
Stubbs criticised historians who failed to understand medieval history because of its containing ‘a good deal of living religion, which … exercised over the daily lives and political views of men an influence that is scarcely comprehensible in the present day’.Footnote 149 Acknowledging the influence exercised by Stubbs's own living religion fundamentally revises our understanding of his place in Victorian thought. Gone is the confident, conciliatory, Whiggish figure; instead, there emerges a historian engaged in an intellectual insurgency against Protestant and Whiggish orthodoxies. Liberty is not republican, but Christian; the national religion is located not in Protestantism, but in the English branch of the catholic and apostolic Church; instead of validating modernity as the telos of secular progress, he questions the reality of this progress, showing English pre-eminence to be the result of divine, not human, agency. Such is the scope and complexity of these views that they might even be described as a Tractarian interpretation of history.
